Taiko Audio SGM Extreme : the Crème de la Crème
- Thread starter CKKeung
- Start date
I make damn fine instant coffee
An excellent sandwich
And am so slow I'm comatose
An excellent sandwich
And am so slow I'm comatose
Thanks, I do live in Köln for many years now, but actually grew up in a wine region (Ahr) close by!
For whites I tend to go for German wines too, for reds I like to look a bit more south
Agree,
no German reds for me as well, but even for German whites do exist some nice alternatives
Christoph,
it has always been a great pleasure and a highlight to meet you and the other Taiko team members at HE Munich in the last years and I am really happy to have you here at WBF as well.
Claudia and I wish you all the best for your new Consultant job at Taiko, it must be most inspiring to work together with the designer of the worlds best server.
We hope to meet you soon again.
Matt and Claudia
BTW, our favorite espresso is Kimbo Extreme
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IMO, Emile is right.
There is some interesting discussion about starting here:
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/...s-thread/page/28/?tab=comments#comment-997383
Matt
The vast majority of audiophiles running Roon are not using an Extreme. There is a large subset of Roon users using HQPlayer who are very keen to sound quality.
Thanks Roy. I'm not so sure we could forever lock down Windows though. I'm pretty sure I read Emile used the LTSC version, and it will receive a rollup update every 3 years, though admittedly that is practically an eternity in IT terms.
Euphony may have done the playback part right, best the rest of it is amateurish. That thing locked up on me so many times, and I couldn't do a reinstall. I take no pleasure in saying these things.
IMO, the best alternative to Roon on a Windows platform is Audirvana.
The main focus is on SQ, it is very lightweight(23MB) and it has a very good Qobuz integration which is better than Roon.
It is perfect for audiophiles who want to do streaming only.
Matt
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That's good to know Matthias. Audirvana was my first player, at that time limited to Mac.
Btw, where are you from in Germany? You mentioned München above. Year before last we were vacationing in Bavaria, and just happened to be in München the first day of Hi-End. I got to meet some of the guys for the first time.
So why would anyone use HQPlayer with Roon, given the added complexity that HQ player involves? The only reason I can think of is because of HQPlayer’s ability to enhance Roon’s SQ, which was basically the point I was making. So let’s say that Roon notice that a lot of users are using HQ Player and decide to add similar capability to Roon. For anyone not wanting to use HQPlayer, that’s ’bloat’.
OK, then what would your approximate definition of "Roon Lite" be?bloat = an excess of software code that has nothing to do with SQ and likely is negatively impacting SQ often due to high latency
This is typically seen in software that tries to do too much.
An example of a software player with no bloat would be something like Bug Head Emperor which had a cult following once upon a time because it focused on doing only one thing well and that was excellent SQ. It had an archaic interface but the whole program was only about 60MB.
Roon Core is many GBs in size when you include the metadata database. Probably no one wants to go back to something as archaic as BHE and so this is why people buy an Extreme because it requires an Extreme to get something like Roon to sound as good. Should Roon continue to bloat up, even the Extreme may not be enough to rescue it and the dreadful sound I heard coming out of my Extreme the other day tells me this could happen.
Why would anyone use the "bloat" of Roon when the focus of the Extreme is on bit-perfect playback.
There are reports that SQ of Roon plus HQP is about the same as Audirvana alone.
Matt
Some people feel that upsampling gets the most out of the system (or DAC). It isn’t just a statement about Roon.
Isn’t HQPlayer available on the Extreme? I know it was on prior servers made by Emile.
I’m afraid I don‘t understand your question. Anything defined as ‘bloat’ are essentially extra lines of code that are unused to achieve the goal but that occupy/utilise system resources either to the detriment of the final result or that require extra resources or work-arounds to offset their negative effect.
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Since you've criticized Euphony OS over several posts, let me just say that whatever your negative experience was, it is not universal. Certainly, my experience has been very positive, and Euphony's UI and UX are a joy to use in the context of Linux music servers. I'll be the first to admit Stylus is not even close to Roon in UX, but SQ-wise it runs circles around Roon. It is only on the Extreme, with Emile's heroic efforts, that Roon has been tamed.
As @romaz mentioned, he and I have found Željko, the developer, to be extremely receptive to our ideas, and collaboratively, we've caused SQ to rise even further.
I'll stop here, as it's OT for the Extreme thread, but I couldn't let this continued sniping go unanswered.
I believe I made two posts about this. Just stating my experience since you thought it was so superior. I could've said a lot more, but I think I was fair and limited in what I said.
